ECGrecover: a Deep Learning Approach for Electrocardiogram Signal Completion

In this work, we address the challenge of reconstructing the complete 12-lead ECG signal from incomplete parts of it. We focus on two main scenarii: (i) reconstructing missing signal segments within an ECG lead and (ii) recovering missing leads from a single-lead. We propose a model with a U-Net architecture trained on a novel objective function to address the reconstruction problem. This function incorporates both spatial and temporal aspects of the ECG by combining the distance in amplitude between the reconstructed and real signals with the signal trend. Through comprehensive assessments using both a real-life dataset and a publicly accessible one, we demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods based on generative adversarial networks and a CopyPaste strategy. Our proposed model demonstrates superior performance in standard distortion metrics and preserves critical ECG characteristics, particularly the P, Q, R, S, and T wave coordinates. Two emerging clinical applications emphasize the relevance of our work. The first is the increasing need to digitize paper-stored ECGs for utilization in AI-based applications (automatic annotation and risk-quantification), often limited to digital ECG complete 10s recordings. The second is the widespread use of wearable devices that record ECGs but typically capture only a small subset of the 12 standard leads. In both cases, a non-negligible amount of information is lost or not recorded, which our approach aims to recover to overcome these limitations.